Open Source Rules the Roost

Redmonk Analyst Stephen O'Grady told eWEEK open source
often wins out over proprietary products these days because there is little
benefit relative to the returns for developing non-differentiating software
in-house.
"While this open source, radically distinct
infrastructure software would seem to pose a threat to the incumbent software
vendors, that's relatively far out. Most adoption of the specialized, Web-scale
technologies is greenfield, if for no other reason than the fact that few if
any packaged applications are capable of running on, say, non-relational
datastores such as Cassandra.

"In the interim, we're likely to see traditional
providers uneasily coexist with the up and coming open-source alternatives that
have sprung from Web native companies such as Facebook and Twitter."

Microsoft's enterprise software business president Bob
Muglia, whose company is under siege by the burgeoning open-source movement,
offered his own explanation of this to the New York Times:
"We did not get access to kids as they were going
through college," Muglia said. When people wanted to build a start-up, "and they were generally
under-capitalized, the idea of buying Microsoft software was a really
problematic idea for them."
In short, today's computer programmers go through college
writing programs on software that wasn't created by Microsoft, which
missed the opportunity to gain bleeding-edge Web programmers.
The open-source approach is extending to the hardware
segment to a degree, according to Pund-IT founding analyst Charles King:
"Many of the big search (Google/Yahoo) and social
networking (FB, etc.) companies are leveraging x86 and Linux distros of one
sort of another. The huge scale-out, cloud-style infrastructures they're using
-- tens of thousands of barebones x86 boxes w/SW-based RAS
features/functionality -- are fundamentally/philosophically different from
traditional Big Iron Systems."
King said the first rank of losers includes traditional
UNIX systems and enterprise software vendors, but there is a trickle-down
affect into the services businesses of IBM and HP.
"In many cases their services organizations are also
being shut out by Web-focused companies (Google's reportedly a good example)
who find that it's cheaper to plan/design their own servers/storage &
outsource fabrication to the same third-party, Asia-Pacific IT manufacturers
used by many system vendors."
This is a big reason why Dell, IBM, HP and others are aggressively
moving to the cloud space. These vendors want to staunch any potential
revenue hemorrhages from their traditional
businesses and embrace the cloud computing model the Internet companies
built with open-source software and commodity hardware.